"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

“And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
— Genesis 1:28 (KJV)

“I don’t want a baby. . . . Nothing will make me want a baby. . . .
“I like not having a giant growth protruding out of my stomach. I hate hospitals and like not having stretch marks. . . .
“This is why, if my birth control fails, I am totally having an abortion.”
— Amanda Marcotte, March 14

Every girl should have a sister, every boy should have a brother, and an ideal family might be two boys and two girls, but things don’t always work out so neatly, which is how my wife and I ended up with six kids: In our quest to provide our eldest daughter Kennedy with a baby sister, we had four boys before Reagan came along.

Despite my joking about the Victory Through Breeding™ program, there wasn’t really an ideology behind our large family. However, by the time our youngest children were born, I was familiar with concerns about demographic decline — the problem of long-term below-replacement fertility rates which had attracted the attention of researchers like Ben Wattenberg (The Birth Dearth, 1989) and others. Low birth rates lead to economic stagnation and other social and political problems, which pro-life activists have been warning about for years.

A diminished sense of irony is one of the consequences of progressive ideology. If they had any concern for intellectual integrity and philosophical coherence, they wouldn’t be progressives in the first place, which is why a fanatical commitment to radical egalitarianism requires a remarkable ability to tune out the cognitive dissonance inherent to such counterfactual beliefs. This was evident in the controversy that inspired Amanda Marcotte’s weird anti-baby rant last week, namely that “the atheist/skeptic community is in an uproar on the subject of abortion” even though “nearly all non-believers are pro-choice.” The proximate cause of Marcotte’s anger — although she’s so perpetually angry she does not really need a reason to begin ranting like a lunatic — was a post by “pro-life humanist” Kristine Kruszelnicki offering non-religious reasons for protecting the innocent unborn. Among other things, Kruszelnicki pointed to opinion polls showing that 1-in-5 atheists are pro-life, a percentage that doesn’t quite square with Marcotte’s “nearly all” claims about the pro-abortion views of “non-believers.”

Facts and logic can never persuade the ideologue, and Marcotte’s beliefs are clearly rooted in emotions that are deeply irrational and intensely personal. No one who does not already share her radical feminist ideology could be persuaded by Marcotte’s arguments. She is losing, and she knows it: 50% of Americans are pro-life, compared to 41% who are pro-abortion, and the trend toward a pro-life majority is one of those facts which are incompatible with Marcotte’s worldview. This explains the wrathful vehemence with which Marcotte denounced Kruszelnicki:

[I]f wasting time typing that shit out amuses you, knock yourself out. But don’t pretend that you’re advancing the cause of free thought while doing so. That’s because rational, free discourse is predicated on the understanding that everyone involved in the debate is arguing in good faith, and I can assure you, after years of dealing with this issue, that anti-choicers are not arguing in good faith.

Marcotte describes Kruszelnicki’s arguments as “infamous,” and calls Kruszelnicki a “forced-birther.” The disproportion between Kruszelnicki’s stimulus and Marcotte’s over-the-top response is remarkable, signifying the desperate importance of abortion as the philosophical sine qua non of Marcotte’s feminist sensibility.

Ah, “the personal is political,” as the ancient feminist maxim declares, and the psychiatric root of Marcotte’s animosity toward “traditional gender roles” is obviously a sour-grapes rationalization: No man has ever wanted her to become the mother of his children, and the reject pretends to be the one doing the rejection. Her boyfriend/roommate is IT director at the Center for Reproductive Choice. No one is trying to impose “compulsory child-bearing” and “traditional gender roles” on her.